70% of firms face skill shortages for server-based roles – Cloud Pro

IT organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit for roles across traditional servers and converged infrastructure, due to a decline in the number of applicants with specialist skills, research has found.

A need to drive down the costs associated with hosting data in the public cloud has forced many businesses to either preserve or expand their on-premise servers, which has placed greater pressures on the hiring of employees with server-based skills.

‘Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure’, which collected data from 525 web-based surveys and 19 phone interviews, found that almost 70% of organisations said that current candidates for those roles lack the skills and experience needed.

“Most IT managers are closely scrutinising their deployment options instead of blindly following the pack to IaaS and other off-premises cloud services,” said Christian Perry, research manager at 451 Research.

“When determining the optimal mix of on and off-premises compute resources, there is no doubt this is hampered by the availability of specialist skills and regional availability,” he added.

As cloud migration continues to increase, analysts expect that the talent pool of server specialists will continue to shrink.

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The problem is exacerbated somewhat by a lack of available internal talent to help facilitate moves away from the public cloud, as the research suggests there has been a tendency in the past to hire those with only general skills rather than server specialists.

Almost 40% of respondents said that they focused on “IT generalists”, citing the need hire for developing methodologies such as automation and software-defined technologies.

“The time and resource savings from these new technologies results in a slightly reduced need for server specialists,” added Perry. “The good news is that there remains a need for specialists across both standalone servers and converged and hyperconverged infrastructures.”